Lately, people have gone completely nuts about cooling every single part of their system. There are literally hundreds of devices on the market designed to cool your CPU, video chipset, hard drives, RAM chips and even those little chips on your Mainboard. Some of these units can be useful, but you can cut back on a lot them if you have good case ventilation. To accomplish this a lot of people are hacking holes in their case to mount fans known as blowholes. This technique may seem drastic for some of you, but it's still the best way to cool your system.

I read a lot of articles about people modifying their case. This gave me some ideas for some case modifications, and I decided to see what I could come up with. The subject is wide and I wanted to include as much detail as I possibly could. For this reason, I decided to split the article into multiple parts. In this first part, I will show you how make those nice blowholes and windows.

The case I am using for this article is the OCD-33333-300 from AMK, which is manufactured by Apex (specs here). They did a pretty good job designing this case, but I wanted to personalize it a little. This full tower case is perfect for this project as it really isn't expensive and still offers first-rate quality, and plenty of space. Most important of all, there is no cutting edge.

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